It's sort of a cultural translation thing, that looks really asinine and bullshit to us (because it is, but I'm arguing a kind of devil's advocate here), but really it's just because we're foreigners looking in on their culture.
In America, white doesn't simply mean colour, and most of them tacitly understand that, because it's just bashed into them. White is defined by its others, in the same way over here we define being a "respectable" person by the otherness of chavs and pikeys. That's why there has to be an entirely seperate category for "white trash", where you had the entry requirements, but somehow failed to live up to the expectations set by it.
There's an element of Schroedinger's race about every "ethnicity" Yanks commonly talk about, as though they view every racial group like a Labour member trying to figure out if "Jewish" refers to and old desert religion or a meaningfully distinct genetic category. I don't think anyone is ever really sure- But that's why the colours of the skins don't matter as much as fitting the profile.
To qualify as latino that chap just needs a few stories about his mama's quesedillas or some shit, and he could have been born on Pluto for all it matters to Yank racialists.
I've said this before, but one of the best books I've ever read on race in America is "How The Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev. Americans can't talk about class, so their discourse on status and disadvantage is seen entirely through the prism of race.
Americans make a sub-division among people they consider white, in that somebody with blonde to auburn or light brown hair is considered "Caucasian", while others are just, well, white. If that. Italians were considered just barely white in parts of the country for a long time, which also had to do with the fact that many of them took up low-paying agricultural jobs in the South after the slaves were freed and plantation owners actually had to start paying people to do the work.
"Caucasian" goes back to an anthropologist in the 19th century who went on an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains, which are right on the border between Europe and Asia, so that you pretty much have a European Caucasus and an Asian Caucasus. People on the European side have lighter skin and hair, while those on the Asian side are noticeably darker and look more like Mideastern or Central Asian ethnicities. Only, the anthropologists didn't really bother going over to the Asian side, and went home assuming that all Caucasians were white people with brown hair. So it's basically a misnomer, but it was then assumed from the expedition's findings that most white Europeans were descended from people from the Caucasus region.
The other annoying thing in the U.S. is people's concept of what it means to actually be "French", "Italian", or any actual nationality. They'll tell you "Oh yeah, I'm Scottish", but they will base that on the fact that two or three generations ago, one of their granddads came over from Scotland.
One of my great-granddads was Alsatian, but it'd be kind of a stretch to me if I told people today that I'm part French, or part German even.
It's so odd, my dad is Irish but it never once occurred to me to describe myself as "half irish" until I met Americans that declare their heritage in nanofractions. I perhaps have a bit more of a foot in their culture than most people born in England, but the absolute insanity of people talking about how Joe Biden might dabble in irish politics because his grandad lived there is horrifying.
>but the absolute insanity of people talking about how Joe Biden might dabble in irish politics because his grandad lived there is horrifying.
As I said further up in this thread, it's great if Joe Biden is proud of his Irish Catholic heritage. Good on him. But it must not be anything more than a personal romantic sentiment. You can't just suddenly start meddling with Irish or British internal affairs just because you're President and feel like wearing it on your sleeve that somewhere way up your family tree, somebody came from Ireland.
We're only about one generation on from the Troubles, and it's not entirely inconceivable that some of the old animosity could flare up again if an outsider like him gets his hands in it the wrong way. I'm not saying you can compare it, but look at the kind of ignorance with which the U.S. has handled its foreign relations with the Middle East the last 80 years or so. A big reason why that whole part of the world is a powder keg today is that Americans have an astonishingly limited grasp of other people's regional history.
America is a tribal society similar to places like Kenya where people identify as from a common descent in addition to the country. So you have Irish-American, Italian-American etc. that all carry distinct histories, traditions and politics. There are obvious historical reasons for this in a new world country largely devoid of a unified concept of nationhood (or ethnic/religious super-majority dominance for much of its history) which it replaces with a near-religious reverence to the regime and consumerism. Sometimes it even proves quite fluid as German-Americans became Americans for a bit or how Roma/Gypsies don't register in the national psyche at all outside of storyteller motifs because they were absorbed.
That is one of the key ingredients to the success of the US as all groups can unify around a common identity not bound to descent. Essentially proper bongo-enriching multiculturalism only it actually works because there's common icons and ideals and if you reject those you'll be shot. This runs into problems as true minorities are grouped into more established labels like Spanish becoming Latin-American or (black) Africans/Jamaicans becoming African-American but they'll be absorbed into those flavours of Americanism whether they want it or not.
Tribes can bundle into super-groups when it suits which you see with the concept of whiteness but really means European cultural roots in the same way Arabs and African are supergroups. This is obviously most apparent in contemporary American politics when groups face real or imagined threats despite them all being filthy colonials without a dash of pedigree.
>>91760 >but the absolute insanity of people talking about how Joe Biden might dabble in irish politics because his grandad lived there is horrifying.
You must've forgotten how Biden has himself spoken of his Irish heritage, the cross-party committee on Ireland that like to threaten us and how some Irish-Americans thought it a terribly fun game to up the 'RA until 9/11. Never underestimate an Americans potential to jab his bloated sausage fingers into situations he doesn't comprehend - especially when it involves his ancestral memory of eating corned beef on St Patrick's day.
German Americans got under pressure to assimilate into mainstream America around 1917 when the U.S. joined WWI and Germans were suddenly the baddies. Before that, German Americans were a distinct group similar to Irish or Italian Americans, holding on to and celebrating their ancestral culture with similar enthusiasm. It's easy to overlook today that Germans were the second biggest group of immigrants after Brits for much of the 19th century, and over 50 percent of white Americans today have some German ancestry.
What few people know is that in the 1930s, when resentment against all things German began to fade again, there were racist extremist groups among German Americans who tried to emulate Germany's Nazi Party, and even held rallies wearing similar uniforms and waving similar flags. It was again really only from about 1941 that that sort of thing was then banned by authorities.
Some white supremacist groups in the U.S. today can trace their roots back to those movements, although they are now made up of any number of different white ancestries.
Interesting website. The "news" articles seem to consist entirely of Biden smears, conspiracy theories and crypto-currencies. There's even one about how triggered Random House staff were by Jordan Peterson. Every article is attributed to Tyler Durden. Why are you reading this?
The comments on that article are staggering, even by BTL shitpost standards. I hope it's just Russian trolling, otherwise America is even more fucked than I thought.
>>91768 I seem to recall Max Keiser going through articles from that site quite often when he wasn't shilling for Big Silver. The site's always been unhinged and seems to appeal to the sort of person who enjoys lazy right-wing confirmation bias and ridiculous grand deep state narratives because of Cultural Marxism™ (Brietbart, Prison Planet etc.).
I think the only consolation is that print media has always been pretty crackers and more often than not completely disingenuous, guilty of a lot of things published in bad faith - so it's no surprise that online shitpost blogs like this do the same.
>Never underestimate an Americans potential to jab his bloated sausage fingers into situations he doesn't comprehend
This. If you've followed Mideastern political events at all in the last 20 to 30 years, Americans simply have no understanding of centuries-old structures, alliances, and sensibilities in that region. Just take the 2003 Iraq invasion. At least the more naive minds at the White House and the Pentagon fully believed that they'd drop a few shedloads of aerial bombs, send in a few tanks and ground troops, remove Saddam, and everything would be hunky-dory, people would cheer in the streets that finally, America in its benevolent greatness brought them democracy. When in reality, it was only the start of much of the unmitigated clusterfuck we're still dealing with in that region nowadays.
Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State under Bush jr., said once in an interview that her administration's goal was to reshape the rest of the world in America's image, and once that would have been achieved, it wouldn't have mattered anymore what country you were, because everybody would just follow America's leadership.
And that's the kind of thinking that is prevalent in their circles of government. Republican or Democrat. It's America first, and that also goes for fifth-generation Irish Americans still feeling somehow emotionally attached to the Homeland they never actually experienced personally.
I think that's a naive interpretation of American power. It's not so much that they have no understanding of the histories of other countries, as much as an indifference. If it's not serviceable to American empire, why would they care?
The depressing part part is how oblivious your average American people are to all this.
I watched The Boys a bit ago and it struck me how directly on the nose of a caricature the Homelander character is- An almost omnipotent unstoppable force everyone fears, yet who's childish and naive and doesn't know how to handle that power, whose powers are a result of Nazi science from Operation Paperclip and falls in love with an actual Nazi. He's not just a Captain America/Superman stand in, he is America.
It's really very blunt, but most Yank viewers interpret it as a topical jab at Trump supporters.
>>91814 In fairness, their lack of understanding often undermines their imperial ambitions.
Think of the way they basically fired everyone who knew anything about Southeast Asia during the McCarthy era because they were too sympathetic to commies, with the result that America spent an unreasonable amount of time being afraid of China and utterly ludicrous amounts of blood and treasure fighting in Vietnam to contain an entirely imagined communist monolith. The first thing China did after America left Vietnam was invade Vietnam themselves, in a twist that shocked everyone since China and Vietnam have traditionally been the best of friends, having only been fighting one another since... before the birth of Christ.
>>91816 The domino effect is real and should be feared though, that's why everywhere in the Old World from Kamchatka to Cape Town fell to the Reds after Vietnam was done and dusted and why Russia and China are still very purely communistic to this day.
It's easy for me to joke about but the stain of McCarthyism is still very much part of contemporary political discourse and the illusion of the dichotomy of choice the American two-party system promotes works wonders in propping that up.
If you like a glaringly obvious, but on the other hand ingeniously implicit caricature of America's view of sand people, you should rewatch the original Stargate film from the mid-90s.
Roland Emmerich is an unsung hero of taking the mickey out of the Americans completely unbeknownst to them. Not only did the satirical message of the original Independence Day completely elude them, but he really nailed it with Stargate where the people who pass through the Stargate, all of whom U.S. military and scientists, come to the rescue of an unwashed desert tribe against their alien oppressor. It brilliantly sums up America's perceived sense of superiority by juxtaposing its high-tech military prowess against tent-dwelling, bearded, foreign-talking tribespeople on another planet who are only a few steps removed from the Stone Age.
Put in the context of the 1990 Kuwait invasion and the Allied response, it doesn't take much to realise what Emmerich was really taking a dig at in his film three years later.
>The EU will call on the US to seize a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to forge a new global alliance, in a detailed pitch to bury the tensions of the Trump era and meet the “strategic challenge” posed by China.
Between this and the RCEP it's looking like us Britlads may be doubleplusfucked on the global trade front.
I think if someone showed me clips from contemporary American Politics and told me it was excerpts from the latest David Lynch experimental film I wouldn't even question it.
>>91844 It's more Cronenbergian to my eyes, but I quite agree. Not to confuse the director metaphor even further but I'd almost think I found my new glasses in an abondoned church the way things are going.
>>91847 given the reference to dency it would seem far more plausible we're dealing with a Monarchist.
Perhaps a Monarcho-Socialist like Her Maj' of course.
No, simply pointing out that liberalism, as we've known it since the time of the "enlightenment", was not a good place to stop. It's less miserable than feudalism, arguably, but the seemingly common belief that it's the endpoint of social progress is offensive at best.
The French Revolution is commonly mythologised as the birth of the modern republic, liberty and all that nonsense. It's no coincidence that in reality it went straight from DeSade to Bonepart. There was no freedom afforded to the common man, only a coup to transfer power from the old aristocracy to the new mercantile class.
Being a little bit facetious obviously. But not by much.
>If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
Every revolution has been a displaced bourgeois removing elites creating utter chaos and destruction before the class system re-establishes itself. Proletariat have never ousted the ruling classes, it's always middle class LARPers who quickly become the kind of despot they deposed. (e.g. Tsar > Communist > Oligarch) This is never clearer than when you hang out with lads that work for Momentum who jokingly cheer on Mao and Stalin, but haven't done an honest days work in their lives.
In some sense Brexit was the great revolution of our time in that it was a group of counter elites who encouraged the masses to smash it all to bits in the name of change and now we're about to enter the equivalent 'reign of terror' period.
>>91850 Paolo Freire sums this up rather nicely in the opening pages of Chapter 1, and the rest of the work talks about ways in which violence, of the structural or actually physical kind, might be mitigated after a revolution. Worth a read, it's short.
The really sad fact of Brexit is that it's still proles being led by, in this case, the decayed aristocracy and their representatives in the Tory Party. Why do politics seem to boil down to ruling elites tapping into a reserve of pent of anger and rage whenever it suits an agenda? Left or right, it's still an agenda that is generally formed by, as you say, "people who haven't done an honest day's work". There have been outliers like the Post-War consensus in the form of the welfare state, but was that ultimately a Bismarckian move to stop actual political violence?
The powerful allure of coups and revolutions is that it's another chance to get things right, until whatever "rational" idea from left or right meets reality, and more importantly, people and realises that we are at best irrational and at worst neurotic. Look at John Nash's game theory, early participants in his experiments acted altruistically, even though it was against their "rational" self-interest as Nash would've hoped, we are not one thing or the other, but each of us living contradictions of both. Add the class system, social hierarchy, social mores and taboos to this and you've got a lot of anger there when the veil slips.
People generally do act in their own rational self-interest most of the time, which is the fundamental problem with revolutions. Any power vacuum will be filled by the nastiest bastard in town, backed by an army of inadequates who see an opportunity to boost their own status. It might be in our collective best interests to work towards the utopia, but a lot of people will see that it's in their individual interest to don the uniform of whoever looks most likely to take power.
The problem with Nash's early experiments was the lack of meaningful stakes, so there was no incentive to "win" and lots of incentive to be seen as having done the right thing. The aviation industry independently discovered this many years ago. If you test the evacuation routes of a passenger plane with a group of volunteers, they'll form orderly queues at the exits; if you offer a small cash prize to the first people off the plane, they'll fight like wild animals.
>>91854 Offering cash prizes is equally flawed because they know perfectly well nobody's going to die in the test situation. People are entirely capable of realising that nasty people are trying to fill the power vacuum and need to be prevented by non-nasty people, it's rational self-interest to do so and a microcosm of the revolution that brought them there in the first place. Your cynical, hobbesian view is long outdated.
>People are entirely capable of realising that nasty people are trying to fill the power vacuum and need to be prevented by non-nasty people, it's rational self-interest to do so and a microcosm of the revolution that brought them there in the first place.
Tragedy of the commons. It might be in our collective interests to stop the nasty people from getting into power, but not many people are going to risk death for the greater good unless someone offers them a personal incentive.
I'm not a Hobbesian, just a behaviourist - people usually do what they're incentivised to do. We can't make better people, but we can build better systems of incentives.
I've read Ostrom's Governing the Commons. I suspect that you haven't. Common pool resources can only be sustainably managed if there are institutions in place to facilitate it. Those institutions don't need to be centralised or imposed from the top down, but they do need the ability to impose meaningful sanctions on transgressors.
>>91861 Maybe but the other lad seems to be off his head if he thinks that "Well, actually ..."
>... Those institutions don't need to be centralised or imposed from the top down, but they do need the ability to impose meaningful sanctions on transgressors.
contradicts the statement
>People are entirely capable of realising that nasty people are trying to fill the power vacuum and need to be prevented by non-nasty people, it's rational self-interest to do so and a microcosm of the revolution that brought them there in the first place.
Anyway, I'm off to give blood. Nobody is incentivising me to do it.
The question is whether, after the established order is overthrown by a revolution, we're capable of establishing the infrastructure necessary to prevent the rise of totalitarianism faster than someone else is capable of establishing a totalitarian regime. Historically, we've had a pretty poor success rate.
>This is never clearer than when you hang out with lads that work for Momentum who jokingly cheer on Mao and Stalin, but haven't done an honest days work in their lives.
Which one was it that had intellectuals working in the paddy fields? Pol Pot?
I was thinking about this post today and I felt bad because I think that the Corbynistas hearts are in the right place, but that they are just a bit young and operating solely from a place of idealism with no pragmatism.
I would like to amend my example to be that of Lulzsec hackers based in western countries being integral in the overthrow of governments during the Arab Spring.
>>91867 Corbynites aren't completely lacking in pragmatism (they are after all the ones in the Labour party rather than the ones hawking socialist worker at every protest going.) Their big problems are being mediocre at media management and occasionally preferring a new and gimmicky policy idea over a fine one from the 1970s that got orphaned in past Labour factional struggles, rather than fundamentally believing in some kind of utopian nonsense.
I'm not getting at you specifically, it's just that there's an idea floating out there that Corbynites becoming more pragmatic would mean "selling out" (to be glib about it) and accepting that they can't except the government to achieve very much, which is an awful way of looking at it. The Corbynite who decides to try and slip free broadband into the back of Starmer's 2024 manifesto in ambiguous language and takes a few public speaking lessons will be ten times the pragmatist politician that the mumbly former-Corbynite who moved dramatically to the right on policy in the hopes of nabbing a cabinet job will.
Full disclosure: I didn't care for the 2019 Labour manifesto, nor did I vote Labour. I just couldn't be bothered trying to pick a historical analogy for the progressive lowering of political expectations, which is what I really dislike. I could make similar points for the right, though (especially in the US) they tend to be more successful at incrementally working towards a long-term goal where the left usually just abandon hope after a few losses.
All the Labour infighting makes me sad, but I have recently realised that this has been standard for as long as there has been a Left. Look at the schism between Marx and Proudhon.
Marx was a wealthy lad that adopted the cause of the working class, whereas Proudhon was a pleb who adopted the rhetoric of bourgeois intellectuals.
The people on the left who best understand the correct long term strategy are the least socially connected to the masses, whereas the people who are most apt at rallying the populace are not generally so prone to this kind of holistic thinking or long term strategy.
IMO University educated middle class Labour idealists would do better to be campaigning in Tory heartlands instead of alienating Northerners, but I am also a cynic and everything is terrible.
>>91866 He also had literally everyone else in the paddy fields though. Howver, if Britain goes that way we'd easily be able to replicate his army of teenage boys on drugs.
There is a lot of "well fuck this I'm taking my ball and going home" on the left, in general, to be very vague and abstract about it all. That's why there are so many shit little splinter parties that will only ever see a couple of thousand votes.
Too many of these people fail to realise the merits of the "big umbrella" or whatever the fuck they call it of the Labour Party. Fair enough it might be run by people you'd spit on as little more than common garden market liberals, but you're not going to pull them left from the outside of the party.
Funnily enough most of these people were pro-EU and always made the argument "but we're better off trying to change it from within!" when challenged by the fundamentally neo-liberal nature of that institution; but when it comes to the Labour party they're all about cancelling their membership and fucking off to vote Socialist Workers Democratic Worker's Democratic Socialist Party Party because Keith is a big evil racist.
>>91871 I know people came up with names like Dear Leader for Corbyn, but calling Starmer Keith/Kieth is a really bollocks moniker and I'm kind of surprised it's taken off.
